Review

Truly, Lucinda Williams has a lot to be thankful for, writes Peter Crawley.

There's her excellent recent album, West, for a start, or the jam-packed conclusion of her European tour in Tripod, or her wealth, or her engagement. But when Williams turns her thoughts towards Thanksgiving day, which she has thus far roundly ignored, she points out that it is a celebration of the Pilgrims' arrival in America and when they "started to kill all the Indians". There is a strong tradition of protest in country, folk, blues and rock - just a few of the genres to which Williams's almost 30-year career can claim allegiance - and if such utterances cast her as a glass-half-empty sort, that misses the bigger point in her music: the milk in the glass is also poisoned and its edge is broken and jagged.

"There is an endless supply of those kinds of stories," she says, shortly after Pineola (inspired by the suicide of a family friend) and just before Drunken Angel (inspired by the bar-room murder of a friend). "Anyone can have the blues."

If Williams herself was not so warm a presence, full of honest, drawled chat as she riffles through a lyric book the size of the Louisiana telephone directory, her poetic streams of loss and longing could be hard to take. But her career has seen her draw from a deep well of raw personal experience and transmute it into entrancing stories and intoxicating songcraft.

Fruits of my Labour and Steal Your Love are both works of intense longing, the first guided by emotions that catch in the throat, the second musically tender but lyrically strident. If the long night is a little dishevelled, moving from the rich timbre of double bass and gentle wisps of pedal steel to the bar-room rock of wailing guitar solos or a dubious foray into something called "hip-billy", that is the consequence of Williams's increasing adventurousness.

That Williams will not delimit her talent or apologise for her sour muse is reason enough for her following to cling to the blues, and to be thankful.